Today in dramatic fashion: DC Mayor Adrian Fenty taps a non-traditional superintendent, a Teach For America alum. From El WaPo:
AT 12:01 THIS morning, D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty took control of the city’s troubled schools.
His first act is to pick as his chancellor, as the superintendent will now be called, a 37-year-old woman who has never run a school district. Mr. Fenty’s unconventional, some might say risky, choice eliminates any doubt about his intent to shake up the troubled system, and to do so strictly on his own terms.
At a news conference this morning, the mayor plans to announce Michelle Rhee, a national expert in urban education, as his choice to replace Clifford B. Janey as head of the D.C. schools. Ms. Rhee is founder, president and chief executive of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit organization that recruits and trains teachers for hard-to-staff schools and helps school districts to reform their operations.
In effect, the mayor is saying that traditional superintendents haven’t worked, so let’s try something different.
…Despite top-dollar per-pupil spending, students in the city’s schools perform worse than students anywhere else in the country. A bureaucracy that serves its interests at the expense of children defies change.
There’s an interesting pattern developing, where African-American Mayors (Fenty in DC, Kilpatrick in Detroit, Booker in Newark, etc) are pushing for pretty dramatic change, and tapping the wisdom of New York City Superintendent Joel Klein, a former Clinton guy.
I wonder how things are proceeding in the Boston superintendent search.
And the MA Commissioner of Education search…